


Last Call

by tentacledicks



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27503020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: Figuring out a home for the turians in Andromeda is as good a way to deal with Macen's death as any. The big problem Avitus has is that all the viable planets have angara on them already.He's used to working alone. Asking for help is a little trickier.
Relationships: Avitus Rix/Evfra de Tershaav
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Last Call

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).



His shuttle is roughly the size of an angaran ship which means he can land it without much trouble on Aya. There’s a section of the spaceport devoted to Nexus ships now, one more grudging acknowledgement of the friendship fostered between the Initiative and the loosely allied Angara planets, so Avitus parks himself between a science shuttle and a civilian transporter before heading towards the center of the capital.

He’s been here before, but not often. Most of the planet is molten and unlivable, with only a few oases tucked between the volcanic explosions rumbling across the surface and sending gouts of ash into the constant roiling storm clouds. If any of the turian cryopods had been lost over the atmosphere of Aya, the people inside them were long dead; Avitus has had better avenues to explore while hunting for survivors. Some of them have even panned out.

The dockmaster doesn’t even glance at him as he passes through, moving around the crowds of angara as he slips through the market. He’s too identifiable, with most of the Initiative personnel on Aya being salarian or asari, but he still doesn’t draw attention like the humans do. And in a way, it’s almost a comfort—he’s noteworthy, but not because of anything about _him_. It’s just because he’s a turian on a planet where turians shouldn’t exist.

Avitus nods to the guards outside the Resistance headquarters, hoping that will be enough. It is, but barely. He’s not exactly the Pathfinder they’ve learned to trust, but they know his face. Probably helps that he asked for a meeting ahead of time instead of just barging in.

It’s funny, because being Pathfinder is like being a Spectre again except for all the ways it isn’t. He has ultimate authority to do just about anything, answerable only to Tann (and in practice, not even him) but he’s doing all this in the open, in public, in the light. It’s not like working in the shadows, the way he grew so used to when he was the Council’s lapdog. Even if Tann’s not holding his leash, every other person in the galaxy is waiting to see what he does next.

Macen would have loved it.

The thought catches somewhere in the center of his chest, the way it always does. He still wakes up some mornings, before his damaged SAM has fully finished syncing with him, and thinks that against all reason Macen might be alive. That maybe he’s just out there, waiting, excited to set off on the grand adventure he’d promised and only hesitating because Avitus needs to catch up to him first. 

Bad thing to think about when he’s walking into a meeting with the notoriously alien-unfriendly leader of a resistance movement. He bundles the grief up, like he has every time before now, and folds it into a box in the back of his head. Someday he’ll have to unpack it all, but that’s not a problem for today. Today, he’s finally doing his damn job.

“Pathfinder,” Evfra says gravely from behind his desk. This isn’t exactly a private place to meet—another thing that ends up being so alarmingly different from his last job—but the rest of the angara in the room are focused on their workstations. The kett are still a problem, and a lot more pressing than whatever it is Avitus wants to discuss.

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me,” Avitus says in return, setting a small datapad on the desk. “I’d rather not step on toes, but the situation for the Natanus survivors is getting dire.”

Evfra picks up the datapad with a gesture for Avitus to continue. There’s the slightest furrow on his brow, but otherwise his expression is hard to read. Harder to read than most angara are, at least.

“Habitat 5 was our best bet in the galaxy, but it’s not the only option. The problem is that there’s evidence of Remnant on the surface, and outside of Eos, every planet with those ruins has had an angara presence at one point or another.” He watches Evfra scroll through the data their scans have picked up, then taps the screen when images of the distant monoliths appear amidst the text. “If this is one of your planets, I want to petition for the option to put an outpost on it. Agricultural focus, primarily.”

“Why agriculture?” Evfra asks, flicking his gaze up. When every other outpost has been focused on research, it’s a good question.

Avitus doesn’t hesitate, flicking through the data until he lands on the thing that caught his attention in the first place. “Animal life is limited so far but plant life appears to be dextro-amino based. There’s a higher level of background radiation because the magnetosphere is thin, but if I had to pick a second-choice planet, this would be it. The less work we have to do to keep our food safe, the better.”

He wonders if it translates. The Natanus had stockpiled food, above and beyond every other ark, because they’d known that there would be no second chances. The human settlements and Initiative outposts could only do so much to produce dextro-amino rations, especially with the levo-amino base that all these planets had. It was a particularly brutal blow that Habitat 5 wasn’t just uninhabitable but totally destroyed, and the destruction of the ark is the sucker punch to finish them off.

Avitus can’t let that happen. Not just because he’s a turian and his people need a chance to survive, but because Macen trusted him with this.

“Walk with me,” Evfra says abruptly, standing with the datapad in hand. He moves without waiting for Avitus to reply, leaving the war room at a brisk pace, passing guards and other Resistance members with only the briefest of acknowledgement.

Impossible to guess where he’s heading, but Avitus falls into place two steps behind him by force of habit. To outside eyes, it looks subordinate, the sort of place for someone to walk when they’re trying to be solicitous. He’s followed behind dozens of petty politicians and oligarchs, the movers and shakers of Citadel space, always two steps behind, always fading into the background. It’s the perfect place to walk if he wants to draw a pistol and fire dead center into the curve of Evfra’s spine.

Old habit. Bad habit. He stretches his legs out and draws even with Evfra instead, following him up stairs and past a roaring waterfall to a semi-private overlook, the burning surface of Aya visible past the lush greenery below the city.

“It’s not a planet we know,” Evfra says, pulling up the coordinates and frowning at the starmap they accompany. “That’s not the same thing as an unoccupied planet. We lost much to the Scourge, and we were still discovering other angara up until the moment the kett arrived.”

“Well, damn.” His mandibles flex, the single nervous tic he’ll allow himself. Then a thought occurs to him. “Was it on the list of planets Ryder pinged when they activated the terraforming network?”

The frown on Evfra’s face twitches, then smooths as he hands the datapad back. “Yes. But we haven’t reached out to it yet. So if you’re going to land there, tread carefully.”

He tucks the datapad away, following Evfra’s pensive gaze as it tracks over the magma flows. Hard to tell if the desire for privacy is because Evfra doesn’t want the location of the planet publicly known or if it’s because he doesn’t want his permission broadcast. Intel on Aya said that Evfra wasn’t conservative, but compared to the Moshae and the governor, he’s the most conservative leader of the bunch. Letting aliens onto their planets was a hard bone to swallow. Any sign that he might be handing one over to the turians on a silver platter…

Yeah, Avitus can understand the desire to keep this conversation quiet.

The nostalgia hits like a wave, the fires on Aya superimposing over a hundred other secret meetings overlooking the Presidium—or Illium—or Palaven—or any of another dozen Citadel-controlled planets, all of them being quietly manipulated and managed from the shadows. Once upon a time, he’d stood up there with another turian and talked about the galaxy they were making. About a future once the work was done. About a life where the shadows wouldn’t be necessary.

“Macen would’ve loved this,” he says without thinking, not sure if he means the challenge of a new galaxy or the wild beauty of Aya, volcanoes and all.

“Macen?” Evfra asks, with nothing more than polite disinterest in his voice.

The grief hits twice as hard on the heels of nostalgia, catching in his throat and threatening to drown him. Most of Andromeda won’t ever learn Macen’s name outside of the memorials and infographics about the founders of the Initiative. He’s just another dead Pathfinder in a long line of them, one more body tucked into the foundation of Jien Garson’s dream. Avitus knows that, but _this_ moment, when everything has the familiar feel of old work, makes it hurt so much worse. There’s not a box big enough to hide it in.

“My old—” He clears his throat, hoping the translator doesn’t glitch with the unfamiliar sound. Never trusted the damn things. “My partner. The first turian Pathfinder. This is what he dreamed of, coming here. The adventure of it all.”

“And you were close.” The careful way Evfra circles that question reminds him of all the times people have pointedly not asked, knowing that they won’t like the answer. Reminds him of all the times he let the question lie, let them assume something easier, let himself be pushed into a role he didn’t occupy because it was more convenient than being fully honest in the moment.

“I never would have come here without him.” The words that follow get stuck somewhere in his throat, choking him for just long enough to remember that this isn’t an old comrade and he’s not shooting the shit on a balcony in the Citadel. “Sorry. I should get going. I’ll send back any information we get about the population on—”

Evfra’s hand catches his arm before he can finish turning away, keeping him from leaving. When Avitus looks at him, his gaze is still resolutely fixed on the horizon, but he says, “Stay. Tell me about him.”

He shouldn’t. He opens his mouth to say as much, then shuts it with a soft click and leans against the railing instead. The clouds on Aya cast everything in a strange, unreal sort of light, making the colors more vibrant, buildings nearly glowing in the occasional shafts of sunlight.

After a couple minutes of silence between them, Evfra says, “When my taoshay and I were deciding where to settle, we asked ourselves what was most important. Neither of us cared for the leadership of our local Resistance cell, and we thought that if we kept our heads down, perhaps we would escape the notice of the kett. There were more children, and fewer helping hands, in my mothers’ home, so we chose Voeld in the end.”

It’s hard to know what the right move is here, but Avitus makes a noise of acknowledgement. He knows the broad strokes of Evfra’s history from briefings and reports sent back to the Nexus, but he has the feeling that no one knows more than that.

“For a time, I thought that decision was what killed him. But the town he grew up in had been raided three weeks prior, so I was mistaken.” Evfra pauses, then finally glances back at him. “In many ways, it was easier before you arrived. We were fighting a war of attrition and had no hope of winning. I knew that someday, I would be reunited with him; I had only the desire to make my time between now and then worthwhile.”

“But now there’s hope,” Avitus says, tasting the bitter words and knowing exactly what Evfra means.

“And I must find a way forward when I never expected to need one,” Evfra agrees. 

Macen died in the wreckage of the Natanus, doing his best to save the man he loved. He never got to see anything like Aya, like Kadara, like the uncanny planet that Avitus wants to settle. It’s the unfairness of it all that finally unglues his throat, and Avitus says, “Do you know what qualities they looked for in the Pathfinders?”

“Ryder’s disposition aside, I assume some level of maturity was expected.” Evfra’s voice is dry but not hurtful. “I’ve only spoken with the other two briefly.”

“It wouldn’t give you a great impression anyways. None of us were first picks.” His mandibles twitch again. “Idealism. Diplomacy. Problem-solving skills of some kind. Alec Ryder was a hard man by reputation, but no one could say he didn’t have big dreams. Macen was the same way—always dreaming of a brighter future, always taking bad odds and making them better. He said I worried too much.”

“A familiar sentiment.”

“If it weren’t for him, I never would have come. This was his dream, not mine. But that was his condition for being Pathfinder: they had to let me be next in line. If he was going to do this, he wanted me by his side, every step of the way.” He can almost hear Macen’s voice, exhilarated as he outlined the plan once the Natanus was in orbit over Habitat 5. Andromeda was going to be an adventure unlike any other.

Evfra pushes off the railing, then offers a hand. The gesture is unexpected enough that Avitus just stares at it.

“I’ve seen the turian Vetra indulge in tavum on occasion. Can your people drink it without issue?” he asks. Considering that Avitus just handed him a thesis on why turian dietary restrictions are a dire cause for concern, it’s a reasonable enough question.

Of course, he’s already tried to drown himself in tavum once before kicking his own ass into gear, so it’s also a question he can answer. “It’s close enough to ethanol that it’s not an issue so long as we drink it straight. ”

“Which is the only good way to drink it,” Evfra says gravely. “I can afford to be away from my desk for a few hours.”

There’s a planet he needs to explore before he can think of relaxing. But Avitus finds himself taking the hand anyways, letting Evfra lead him to something other than the crushing weight of duty. The turian colony can wait an hour or two.

* * *

He leaves. He comes back. Evfra offers him a drink again the next time he lands, and then again the time after that.

Avitus wonders why it feels a little like coming home, then buries himself in the work to forget that dangerous question entirely.

* * *

They try to get him to name the planet. He promptly makes that Kandros’s problem instead, because there’s only one name he can think of and it’s an intolerable way to remember him. The threat to name it after his mentor instead is enough to make Kandros begrudgingly accept the responsibility, and since the outpost intends to handle itself, he’s firmly off the hook.

There are ruins, both Remnant and angara, but no living cities. Scourge spikes exist closer to the Remnant, but far fewer than on some of the afflicted planets. Even if Avitus can’t activate the vault, he doesn’t need to—Ryder turned the key months ago and he can see the changes day to day even now. The magnetosphere was probably damaged when the Scourge struck, but the angaran settlements he’s found are small and limited anyways, so he suspects the evacuation was less ‘finding a new home’ and more ‘going back to an old one’.

It’s a dextro-amino based planet, another diamond in a galaxy that has too few of them, and it’s one that they can build on. The fact that it’s so like Palaven in atmosphere makes him want to laugh until he cries, but he settles for being satisfied with the promise of food grown by their own hands in the future.

“I figure there was an attempt to colonize it before the Scourge, but once there wasn’t anything blocking the radiation, attempts to reseed it with levo-amino crops fell by the wayside,” he explains, half-folded into a corner of Evfra’s bed in lieu of a chair. There’s only the one in the room, and it’s currently occupied.

“Wouldn’t the radiation present an issue for your people?” Evfra asks, a hot mug of tavum at his elbow as he skims through the reams of information Avitus brought back. He figures he owes the angara another piece of their history as thanks for giving up a planet, no matter how inhospitable, and carting his scans back to Aya makes a good excuse to see Evfra.

“Not really. It’s lower than the background radiation of our home planet, and most of the wildlife has adapted to live with it. We’re not like the angara. All this hard stuff has a purpose beyond looking pretty.” He taps a piece of his carapace, one of the sections that sticks out jagged over his elbow. Some time between the first cup of tavum and what he’s hoping is not the last, he’d pulled off his armor and the heavy jacket that laid underneath it.

Evfra looks up, eyes narrowed consideringly, then sets the datapad aside. He moves with the deliberate slowness of a drunk fully aware of that fact, resting the pads of his fingers on craggy, metallic surface, then hums low in his throat. 

It’s not the same noise a turian throat would make, but Avitus feels chills down his crest anyways.

“I had wondered,” Evfra says without clarifying what he was wondering about. It takes entirely too long for Avitus to remember their conversation, and he clears his throat when Evfra’s fingers continue to linger.

“So there’s—not a lot that worries us when it comes to that. Radiation, that is.” It’s tempting to reach out and grab Evfra’s hand, to turn it over and inspect the roughness of his palm that still pales in comparison to hard turian skin. The angara are _soft_ , all roundness and curves in a way that’s utterly alien beyond what even the other Citadel races can manage, and a part of him hungers for the chance to explore.

Because Evfra isn’t like Macen at all. His humor is dry, most of his speech grave, his life compounded by loss upon loss until there’s only the grim, enduring core of him remaining. He’s a warrior and a good drinking buddy and he _understands_ in a way that no one else does. In a way that no one else can, because no one else has picked up a mantle that didn’t fit and then walked forwards knowing their perfect half won’t be waiting for them on the other side.

The grief counselor on the Nexus keeps trying to talk to him and Avitus just can’t, not when he’s yet another casualty of the clusterfuck that was their entrance to Andromeda. Not when he knows that Macen is just a name to them, a footnote in his file next to ‘anxiety over being Pathfinder’ and ‘post-traumatic stress from prior career as a Spectre’. It’s easier to find an excuse to stop by Aya on occasion, some spurious reason to ask for Evfra’s input on the new turian homeworld and have little moments like… this.

Macen was his sun, his stars, his guiding light in the darkness. He can’t replace that, doesn’t even want to try. But Evfra is absolutely none of those things, and there’s a wonderful freedom in knowing that he can’t fail to meet expectations—because Avitus doesn’t expect anything from him in the first place. He just wants, helplessly and aimlessly, and doesn’t move his arm out from under Evfra’s touch.

“It occurs to me,” Evfra says, thumb dragging over the place where his carapace hits leathery skin and blends right in, “that everything I know about your people could fill a cup and no more.”

“What else do you want to know?” His mouth is dry but the only thing on hand is tavum and it’s closest to the arm Evfra is stroking. Avitus can’t tell if he’s reading too much into the gesture or if he’s just been out of the game that long.

Evfra hums again, folding his webbed fingers over the bony jut of Avitus’s wrist. “How much of your body is covered in this? Not just your face, obviously.”

“Close to two-thirds,” he says blankly, staring at the curve of pale blue over grey, the way Evfra’s muscles flex in his forearms. “Are you flirting with me?”

“If it’s unwelcome, I can stop.” Maybe it’s the tavum, but Evfra sounds like he doesn’t _want_ to stop. And that’s the thing that finally makes him move, his talons running carefully over the tendons in Evfra’s hand. He would have been happy with just a drinking buddy, would have been happy stewing in the unfulfilled attraction as he muddled his way forward—but.

“Not unwelcome. It’s just… been a while.” He turns his hand, catching Evfra’s fingers between his own, feeling that soft angaran skin against his own. Different in so many ways, but identical in the one crucial way that matters.

“Yes,” Evfra says, and it’s not dry wit in his voice this time. “It has been.”

If he were sober, Avitus would have the words for this moment. Since he’s definitely tipsy enough that his words will be as clumsy as he gestures, he tugs Evfra closer, out of the chair and onto the bed, their bodies ill-fitting but somehow managing to slot together anyways. He’s not a young man, not anymore, but Avitus remembers this part now, the awkward stage where they figure out just how it’s going to go, who’s going to end up on which parts of the bed, who’s going to end up kicked off by the end of the night.

It’s an adventure, and he thinks that maybe it’s exactly the kind that Andromeda was meant for.

One of Evfra’s hands is braced on the bed at his side, his muscular thighs tangled with Avitus’s own lean, bony legs. His face is very, very close when Avitus says, “So you want to become more familiar with turian anatomy?”

Evfra laughs, very softly. And then he says, “I do.”

* * *

Evfra takes three steps onto a new planet and makes a face at the turian architecture going up, slowly but surely. It runs counter to angaran aesthetics and even Avitus can admit it looks pretty ugly mid-construction. But he’s not looking at the half-built buildings and the mixture of workers, turian and not, doing their best to get things done.

He’s looking at Evfra’s face, the way he solemnly regards the scene in front of him, and thinking, _Mace, you would have loved him too_.


End file.
